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Turkish Pilaff
Cook one-half cup rice in boiling salted water. When soft, drain and rinse by pouring hot water over it. Place three tablespoons butter in an omelet pan and as soon as the butter begins to melt, add the rice. Cook for three or four minutes, add one-half cup canned or fresh tomatoes, one-half cup of cold chicken cut into dice and just enough white stock to moisten to a paste. Add a little more butter if a richer mixture is preferred. Season highly and serve on toast, garnishing the dish with points of toast.
A leftovers dish dressed up with a Turkish name: cooked rice, diced chicken and tomato bound with stock and butter. It comes together in ten minutes once the rice is done.
- This is not a true pilafThe rice is boiled in water, drained and rinsed, then fried — the opposite of the absorption method that defines pilav. Rinsing after boiling washes off surface starch so the grains stay separate, which is the whole point of the technique here. Do not skip it or you will get a sticky mass.
- Omelet panA shallow, sloping-sided skillet, usually 8 to 10 inches. Any wide frying pan works; the width matters more than the shape, since the rice needs room to fry rather than steam.
- White stockUnroasted chicken or veal stock, pale and mild. Ordinary low-sodium chicken stock is the direct substitute. You need only a few tablespoons — enough to bind, not to make a risotto.
- Canned tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the period were generally packed whole in their own juice and tended to be wetter than many modern packs. Drain a half cup of modern canned tomatoes and chop them, or the mixture may loosen instead of holding as a paste.
- "Season highly"The recipe does not say with what. Salt and black pepper at least, and a pinch of cayenne or paprika if you like. Cold cooked chicken and boiled rice are both bland, and the butter needs the counterweight.
- Cold chickenThis assumes yesterday's roast bird. Diced cooked thigh meat has more flavor than breast here. Add it at the end and heat it through only — it is already cooked and will turn stringy if it fries.
- YieldHalf a cup of raw rice serves two as a light lunch or four as a small savory course. Scale up proportionally; the pan needs to stay wide enough that the rice sits in a shallow layer.
- The toastServe on thick-cut toast so it holds under the moist mixture, and cut the garnish into triangles — "points" is simply a slice halved corner to corner, or quartered.
Pilaff is one of many English spellings of Turkish pilav, itself from Persian polow, and by the late nineteenth century the word had become a general Anglo-American label for almost any dish of rice cooked with fat and flavorings. What appears here has little to do with Ottoman cookery beyond the name: it is a chafing-dish and luncheon preparation of the sort that filled the back pages of American household manuals around 1900, when a cold roast chicken was expected to reappear at a second and third meal in some more presentable form.